Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 159
“We are guilty of misunderstanding the meaning of existence; we are guilty of distorting our goals and misrepresenting our souls.” (Who is Man pg 114)
The more we immerse ourselves in this sentence, the more embarrassment we can experience and then the more determined will our transformation and change be. We have a list of goals for what a ‘good life’ looks like that we have inherited, learned, adapted/adopted from history, family, society, etc. So many people live in the ‘if only’ mentality of life. ‘If only’ I had ______, everything would be okay and so many people live only to achieve the ____. Upon ‘arriving’ at their goal, they still feel empty and angry, lonely and tired, hungry and unsatisfied. Yet, we persist in distorting our goals with the lure of the ‘gold’ that flashes before our eyes. We are deceived by the shiny prize that is just out of our reach and, we think we can obtain, only to find out over and over again that the game is rigged, just like the ones at most carnivals. And still, we persist in the delusion and the distorted belief that we can, if we are good enough, lucky enough, etc, eventually achieve these distorted goals.
What is it that causes this? I believe it is a basic lack of awareness and education. We are brought up to believe we ‘can be anything we want to be’ and this is where the distortion begins. While it may be physically possible, intellectually probable that we can choose for ourselves what ‘we want to be’, there is a spiritual component that Rabbi Heschel speaks to often as does Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz in his book Thirteen Petaled Rose, that there is a divine intention, a demand from the Ineffable One that is our true calling and our authentic goal to respond to and achieve. Yet, we are not interested in these ‘spiritual matters’ as evidenced by the truth of how many parents allow their children to end their spiritual education, spiritual training and spiritual understanding at age 13 or younger! We are living in a society where every action is based on achievement, be it as a member of a gang or high society. Our society is so obsessed with optics that we will smile and play kiss/kiss with people we despise, people we have harmed and screwed over, even ask them for favors because our goals are so distorted. “Just win, Baby” was a saying of Al Davis who owned the Oakland Raiders in their heyday. This is the way we set goals today, “just win” no matter what the cost is to our own souls, the soul of another human being, the soul of our community and world-just win-this is the heart of our distortion of our goals.
We have the opportunity, through this teaching of Rabbi Heschel, to reverse this awful trend. We have the spiritual strength to set and achieve the authentic goals of our soul-kindness, loyalty, truth, compassion, tshuvah, justice, love-our job is to build up our spiritual ‘muscles’ so this way of being, these goals become our default path of life instead of an anomaly. We can and must ask ourselves how we have continued to distort our goals, how we have continued to misrepresent the meaning of our existence from being human to ‘what’s in it for me’. We have to engage in a journey to find the truth of our souls, the true calling God is calling us to and for, the unique need only we can fill and live in these ways, live life out loud in service rather than in self-centeredness.
Immersing ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is the catalyst to seeking a deeper, richer, more truthful and authentic understanding of our inner life. It is a path to finding harmony with all our parts, it is a gift of self-discovery that allows us to transform success into living a life of meaning, purpose, authenticity and one that enables us to live with at least some of the ‘trappings’ of success, remember having money, power, prestige is not a bad thing if we get them and don’t distort our goals, misrepresent our souls and misunderstand the meaning of our existence! Both of these goals are possible to attain, when we do it with an integrated beingness.
In recovery, we are confronted with our guilt all the time, which is not to say we live a humiliated bent-over life. On the contrary, our guilt comes from our embarrassment once we become aware of our errors, our distortions, our misrepresentations. We search out our guilt in order to repair, change and hope for a better today/tomorrow. We know that without guilt, we cannot ask for forgiveness and change our behaviors, we know that confronting our self, the person we harmed, and God moves us to change our ways of being so we continue to trudge forward.
I have been guilty of distortion and misrepresentation. I realize today that I distorted my own status with people. I deceived myself to believe that the relationships I had were not merely transactional, how foolish. I find myself being asked to do things by people who were treacherous to me at my lowest point in the past 33 years, with no acknowledgement of their treachery-in fact they believe they were right to harm me, I had it coming after all. I think about these requests and when I say yes to them, I am saying yes to a calling from God, not these people, I am saying yes to a calling to help a cause I believe in deeply and gave over 33 years to. I realize that I distort my goals when I let pettiness and pride enter into my decision making, when I say no or yes, just to “get even”. This misrepresents my soul. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark